Appearance Based Object Modeling using Texture Database: Acquisition Compression and Rendering

Image-based object modeling enables us to compose photorealistic images of modeled objects for various rendering conditions (viewpoints/light directions, etc.) However, it is very challenging to acquire a huge number of object images for all combinations of capturing parameters and to then handle the resulting huge data sets for the model. In this paper, we present a novel modeling method for acquiring and preserving appearances of objects. Using a specialized capturing platform, we first acquire objects’ geometrical information and their complete 4D indexed texture sets, or bi-directional texture functions (BTF) in a highly automated manner. Then we compress the acquired texture database using tensor product expansion. The compressed texture database enables us to render the objects with arbitrary viewpoints, illumination, and deformation.